Recasting French literary history in terms of the cultures and peoples that interacted within and outside of France's national boundaries, this volume offers a new way of looking at the history of a national literature, along with a truly global and contemporary understanding of language, literature, and culture. The relationship between France's national territory and other regions of the world where French is spoken and written (most of them former colonies) has long been central to discussions of "Francophonie." Boldly expanding such discussions to the whole range of French literature, the essays in this volume explore spaces, mobilities, and multiplicities from the Middle Ages to today. They rethink literary history not in terms of national boundaries, as traditional literary histories have done, but in terms of a global paradigm that emphasizes border crossings and encounters with "others." Contributors offer new ways of reading canonical texts and considering other texts that are not part of the traditional canon. By emphasizing diverse conceptions of language, text, space, and nation, these essays establish a model approach that remains sensitive to the specificities of time and place and to the theoretical concerns informing the study of national literatures in the twenty-first century.

Introduction: The National and the Global, by Susan Rubin Suleiman and Christie McDonaldAcknowledgments
Part I. Spaces
1. Worlding Medieval French, by Sharon Kinoshita
2. "There's a New World Here": Pantagruel via Oronce Finé, by Tom Conley
3. The Global and the Figural: Early Modern Reflections on Boundary-Crossing, by Jacob Vance
4. Globality and Classicism: The Moralists Encounter the Self, by Eric Méchoulan
5. From the Rectangle to the Globe: Theater in the Ancien Régime, by Jérôme Brillaud
6. Planetary Perspectives in Enlightenment Fiction and Science, by Natasha Lee
7. Homesickness in an Expanding World: The Case of the Nineteenth-Century Lyric, by Evelyne Ender
8. Critical Conventions, Literary Landscapes, and Postcolonial Ecocriticism, by Françoise Lionnet
9. Literature, Space, and the French Nation-State After the 1950s, by Verena Andermatt Conley
10. All Over the Place: Global Women Writers and the Maghreb, by Alison Rice
Part II. Mobilities
11. Speaking the Other: Constructing Frenchness in Medieval England, by Kimberlee Campbell
12. Walking East in the Renaissance, by Philip John Usher
13. Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal, by Faith E. Beasley
14. On the Ethnographic Imagination in the Eighteenth Century, by Christie McDonald
15. The Slave Trade, La Françafrique, and the Globalization of French, by Christopher L. Miller
16. The Voyage and Its Others: Nineteenth-Century Inscriptions of Mobility, by Janet Beizer
17. Traffic in Translation: Rereading Supervielle, by Sylvia Molloy
18. From the French Roman Colonial to the Francophone Postcolonial Novel:
René Maran as Precursor, by F. Abiola Irele
19. French Literature in the World System of Translation, by Gisèle Sapiro
20. Intellectuals Without Borders, by Lawrence D. Kritzman
Part III. Multiplicities
21. Language, Literature, and Identity in the Middle Ages, by Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet
22. Negotiating with Gender Otherness: French Literary History Revisited, by Danielle Haase-Dubosc
23. Specters of Multiplicity: Eighteenth-Century Literature Revisited from the Outside In, by Yves Citton
24. Speculation and Economic Xenophobia as Literary World Systems: The Nineteenth-Century Business Novel, by Emily Apter
25. Jews and the Construction of French Identity from Balzac to Proust, by Maurice Samuels
26. Traversal of Languages: The Québecois Laboratory, by Lise Gauvin
27. Space, Identity, and Difference in Contemporary Fiction: Duras, Genet, Ndiaye, by Michael Sheringham
28. "Présence Antillaise": Hybridity and the Contemporary French Literary Landscape, by Mylène Priam
29. Choosing French: Language, Foreignness, and the Canon (Beckett/Némirovsky), by Susan Rubin Suleiman
Bibliography
List of Contributors, by Index, by